Famous Firsts by American Women, 1587–1900

Here is a timeline about famous firsts by American women. This information includes such notable figures as the first published author in 1650 (Anne Bradstreet), to Elizabeth Blackwell receiving her medical degree in 1849, to astronaut Dr. Peggy Whitson, who became the commander of the International Space Station in 2007. We also include the 2008 elections during which Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin became the first female vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket, and the firsts of Senator Hillary Clinton, the first woman to win the New Hampshire presidential primary in 2008, and then, in 2016, the Democratic nomination for president.

Mary
Katherine Goddard and her widowed mother become publishers of the
Providence Gazette newspaper and the annual West's Almanack,
making her the first woman publisher in America. In 1775, Goddard
became the first woman postmaster in the country (in Baltimore), and
in 1777 she became the first printer to offer copies of the Declaration of Independence that included
the signers' names. In 1789 Goddard opened a Baltimore bookstore,
probably the first woman in America to do so.

1767

Anne Catherine Hoof Green takes over her late husband's
printing and newspaper business, becoming the first American woman
to run a print shop. The following year she is named the official
printer for the colony of Maryland.

1790

Mother Bernardina Matthews establishes a Carmelite convent near Port Tobacco,
Maryland, the first community of Roman Catholic nuns in the Thirteen
Colonies. (The Ursuline convent established in New Orleans in 1727
was still in French territory.)

1792

Suzanne Vaillande appears in The Bird Catcher, in New
York, the first ballet presented in the U.S. She was also probably
the first woman to work as a choreographer and set designer in the
United States.

Anne Parrish establishes, in Philadelphia, the House of
Industry, the first charitable organization for women in
America.

1809

Mary Kies becomes the first woman to receive a patent, for a
method of weaving straw with silk.

Elizabeth Ann Seton establishes the first
American community of the Sisters of Charity, in Emmitsburg,
Maryland. In 1975 she became the first native-born American to be
made a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.

1849

Elizabeth Blackwell receives
her M.D. degree from the Medical Institution of Geneva, N.Y.,
becoming the first woman in the U.S. with a medical degree.

Arabella Mansfield is granted admission to practice law in
Iowa, making her the first woman lawyer. A year later, Ada H.
Kepley, of Illinois, graduates from the Union College of Law in
Chicago. She is the first woman lawyer to graduate from a law
school.

1872

Victoria Claflin Woodhull
becomes the first woman presidential candidate in the United States
when she is nominated by the National Radical Reformers.

Sarah E. Goode becomes the first African-American woman to
receive a patent, for a bed that folded up into a cabinet. Goode,
who owned a furniture store in Chicago, intended the bed to be used
in apartments.

1887

Susanna Medora Salter becomes the first woman elected mayor
of an American town, in Argonia, Kansas.

1896

Alice Guy Blaché, the first American woman film
director, shoots the first of her more than 300 films, a short
feature called La Fee aux Choux (The Cabbage
Fairy).

1897

H.H.A. Beach's "Gaelic Symphony" is the first symphony by a
woman performed in the United States, and possibly the world.